#galakta

It’s dark in the tunnels buried within the meteor (it always is), but with the fragile dimness of your wand the pitch black swallowing the path before you seems that much darker. Intrinsically, it occurs to you that this is simply a memory, and the ghost pain circling your torso isn’t going to start gushing royal life onto the cold stone walkway as long as you don’t dwell on it too hard.

Someone did not get the memo.

Your sweater is long-sewn up, a dream bubble Kanaya kindly enough to lend her stitching hand to you. In return you run your fingers over the wound you had inflicted on her (it seems like so long ago), hoping it would heal, and the skin stretched and knit itself across exposed internal clockwork, some SGRUB magic healing her frayed and bleeding ends. She’d appreciate that, the comparison to fabric. The vertebrae do not reconnect, and at the end of it you’re left staring at the rainbow-fractured dream bubble background through a hole in her middle big enough to stick both arms through, if you so desire. You apologize. She hums something lyrical and lilting, simply turning back to her work, waving you off, seemingly unimpeded by the missing links in her spine, and you look over your shoulder once on your way out, watching her stand and heft bolts of fabric in her arms like nothing at all.

Shaken out of the brief reverie by the quiet puddle-stepping of your own shoes, your eyes go sad as the dim light recognizes the yellow tracks dragged through the stone floor. At the top of the stairs, you pause. It’s a short-lived thing, this hesitance.

When you find him, propped in a slouch with his back to the wall, covered in yellow, nonresponsive to the wand rendered nothing more than a glowstick in your hand—he’s blind, you remember, blinded by your rage—a noise leaves you, something like a sob, something like a cackle. Though his eyes are dull and glossed over, his face turns apathetically to the sound. Setting yourself against the wall next to him, Sollux barely even twitches a finger.

“I’m sorry we had to meet like…this.” You reach out to touch him, to smear some of the blood on his cheek.

“I missed you.” The cadence is wrong.

“What?”

“You homicidal fucking maniac, I missed you.”